Description

Bowser is back, and along with the Bowser kids, he's out to spoil Mario's day once again.

This time, along with nabbing the Princess, the Bowser crew have also taken the magic wands from the Kings of each land and turned them into creatures.
It's up to Mario and Luigi to get back the magic wands, defeat Bowser, and save the Princess all before the day is done.

Old and new power-ups abound in each level for the Mario Brothers, including the return of the Super Mushroom and Fire Flower, plus the new power-ups including the frog suit, the warp flute, and the most important of all, the leaf, which allows the player to fly and attack enemies with your tail.

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Language

On the map screen, the treasure ship icon features a symbol on its sail. The symbol is the Japanese word "takara", which means "treasure".

References to the game

In the movie "The Wizard", which is about a seven year old in a videogame competition, Super Mario Bros 3 was featured as a "brand new game" which none of the contestants had gotten a chance to play before.

References

During the game, Mario can find a Warp Whistle, which will take him to a new area of the game. When using the Whistle, the tune played is the exact melody used from the Whistle in The Legend of Zelda.

Sales

The game sold nearly 30 million copies worldwide.

Speedrun

As of 2010, the fastest run through the the game is under eleven minutes (0:10:48 as conventional speedrun and 0:10:25 tool-assisted).

Version differences

The Koopa Kids were only named in the North American and European versions. The Japanese version completely omits giving them names.

At some point, Nintendo re-released Super Mario Bros. 3 with a couple of text changes:

If you picked up a copy close to its release date, you may have noticed that Toad ends his N-Spade game instructions with "Miss twice and your out!", which is incorrect, as "your" should have been "you're". However, you also may have noticed that there was no more room in the text box to include an apostrophe. In the new version, Toad says "You can only miss twice!" instead of "Miss twice and your out!". Instead of resizing the text box so they could include an apostrophe, they just rewrote the last sentence using the same amount of characters.

Another change was to Princess Toadstool's letter to Mario after beating World 2. Instead of "Kuribo's shoe," she now says "Goomba's shoe." Kuribo is the Japanese name for Goomba.

As for the credits, the level names were changed to less-creative titles in the new version. Basically, all the names were changed to "Something Land". The changed names are in parenthesis: Grass Land (Grass Land), Desert Hill (Desert Land), Ocean Side (Water Land), Big Island (Giant Land), The Sky (Sky Land), Iced Land (Ice Land), Pipe Maze (Pipe Land), Castle of Koopa (Dark Land).

Related Web Sites

Howard & Nester do Super Mario Bros. 3 (A regular feature in Nintendo Power magazine, Howard & Nester was a comic strip about two game whizzes who would one-up each other, while disclosing hints and tips, in the settings of various recently-released games for the NES platform. In the May/June 1990 two-page installment, they explore the pros and cons of pursuing the second Warp Whistle instead of proceeding in the castle.)